kanenas@hawaii.rr.com said the following on 01/20/2010 04:26 PM:
On Wednesday 20 January 2010 05:33:09 am Anton Aylward wrote:
Its all about statistics. Somewhere out there is a 500G drive that will work perfectly for another 50 years. But its the ones that fail we hear complaints about.
That would be so *if* they sold enough of them.
but it is also all about statistics when 3 out of 4 drives have to be returned. That almost by itself leads into the conclusion that the good old 6 sigma production ethic (it *is* an ethic more than a process) is out the window...
No, its about economics. Manufacturing gets to a point where increasing the reliability by another 1% adds another 10%, 15%, 30%, 100%, 600% ... exponentially to the production cost. At some point its cheaper to live with what reliability figures you've got and unconditionally replace any failed units than it is to try an improve the reliability. After all, its the bean counters that run the company, the investors wanting a ROI, the executives who have to face up to the Wall Street analysts scathing comments about the performance of the stock, not the engineers and certainly not the customers. -- If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun. - Katharine Hepburn -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org